"Future versions of Windows are going to bear little resemblance to what we've heard so far officially - and unofficially - from Microsoft and the individuals who love to leak tidbits about the company. In fact, according to one of my reliable tipsters, the new and reorganized Windows organization, led by Senior Vice President Steven Sinofsky, is trying to wean folks completely off the Windows code names they have been using for the next couple of releases of Windows. Welcome to the brave new world of 'Windows 7' (a boringly named complement to 'Office 14', the successor to Office 2007)." More here.

The other thing I'd advise Microsoft is two reduce the amount of consumer versions of their OS to just two: Windows Classic and Windows [insert name]. Both are based on NT, but the latter starts with a clean slate; no backwards compatibility in place. The former is just Windows as we know it today, but highly optimised, no massive new features. This version will be mostly for businesses and people who depend on older applications.

The non-classic version could of course include a virtual compatibility layer a la Classic in Mac OS X.

And one more thing they could do is stop putting the year in their releases. Windows Server 2003 R2 is the latest greatest server, yet it sounds old and out dated... At least with XP (to a degree) and Vista they did not do this so prominently.

But on the other hand, the trend in operating systems and middlewear is moving from feature-based releases to time-based cycles. Features don't really excite people anymore. The aspect of Vista that the media really keyed in on the most was how long it took to release.

When you have a mature product, which describes most of the OS and middlewear products in production deployment today, the promise of consistent updates is way more valuable than that of whiz-bang features. If you can plot your next 2 releases on a calendar to within a month, then businesses and OEMs will be much more comfortable planning their IT strategy around your products.

With this and your point about "dating" in mind, I like Ubuntu's scheme. Everyone knows the next release will be called 7.04, and hence will come out during April 2007. But when it's 2010 and some customers are still on 6.06 LTS, it doesn't inherently sound as dated as if it were called Ubuntu 2006.

I disagree with moving away from catchy codenames. Today, software is about community. Even the biggest shops rely on their ability to cultivate a community of enthusiastic developers and beta-testers. Fun codenames get people interested. Again, consider Ubuntu.

So you gain lower performance and the extra benefits inherrent of a young product, i'm not saying OSX is a bad product i'm just stating the obvious of what happens when you start from scratch.

OS7-X users have also had to completely fundamentally change hardware platform at least 3 times in the last decade to accommodate these clean breaks. Expensive for users, very profitable for the shareholders

"OS X clean slate" is not "clean" at all: they have reused Mach a 'micro'-kernel, that is not especially well-known for its speed..
They reused Nextstep too, so OS X is all about reuse, which is a good idea, I agree.

As for the 'month of security', bah, this guy reported many bugs for application running on MacOS X, which is quite different than bugs in OS X (to be fair, he also found a few of those), if he had reported only security troubles in MacOS X, the list would be much smaller so it was a kind of publicity stunt.

they're both extremes in my opinion. yeah, the promising of vapourware features for years at a time, can suck, especially when it turns OS comparisons into the "well sure X can do that now, but just you wait, Windows Foo will be able to do one hundred times that!" On the other hand, the Apple route is just silly and hardly customer friendly. Smart marketing perhaps, but still I don't like the let's wait on baited breath for what Jobs will reveal next type deal. I like developments to be somewhat more open (even if it's something closed source). Apple will even go so far as suing their fans for "revealing" what's might be next.

can't we just have a middle of the road approach? don't overpromise, but don't be so tight fisted you'd think the security of the nation is at stake.

Microsoft need to follow Apple's style of product launch. Nothing for months or years, and then an amazing new product, new features, available Today.

No. Microsoft should provide the information in advance due to the whole "Windows ecosystem" thing. Software and hardware vendors (no matter how small they are) need the information in advance, so that they can release new products on time, to support customers that decide to upgrade early. MS does not have to heavily advertise the changes and new features in advance, but the information should be available.

Unless you want your OS and ALL your software from just one vendor - Microsoft, or you want third-party software (including device drivers) to be provided about one year after the OS launch.

However, Microsoft could do a bit better on hyping the stuff that, later, may not make it into the final version (like WinFS, for example).

I agree. Not that I am a friend of Microsoft, but if I were, I would worry about such things as:

1. Where are the Microsoft ads about Vista? Not about Microsoft in general, but about Vista? AFAICT, in the UK so far the biggest advertisement for Linux has been BBC news coverage. (For those who are unfamiliar with it, the BBC is a government-run channel on which no adverts are allowed (except for those about its own shows, of course) and which has, or at least used to have, an unrivalled reputation for impartiality in news reporting. Whilst they are certainly still more impartial than rubbish like Fox News, for example, their Vista coverage sounds like an MS PR release.)

2. Where are the Microsoft ads about Windows Live?

3. Where are the sycophantic reviews about how utterly wonderful Windows Vista is?

4. Where are the features that are just at the threshold between eye-candy and a middling improvement to some of the worst defects of Windows, like we used to have in the "good old" days?

I don't know who is to blame for the troubles at Microsoft, but there's no doubt about it - they just can't work their old magic anymore.

Whilst they are certainly still more impartial than rubbish like Fox News, for example

Its hard to imagine a more biased news organisation than the BBC. Maybe CBS or MSNBC. In recent times both the BBC and CBS have been left with egg on their face as a result of being so blinded by their biases.

In general the standard of popular, mainstream journalism these days has regressed to be nothing more than shallow, superficial, thinly guised opinion pushing an agenda.

Its hard to imagine a more biased news organisation than the BBC. Maybe CBS or MSNBC. In recent times both the BBC and CBS have been left with egg on their face as a result of being so blinded by their biases.

Actually, whether or not you think the BBC is biased, I think the BBC is still the least biased in the United Kingdom. As for CBS, I couldn't say, but despite being no friend of Microsoft I would be surprised if MSNBC were anywhere near as biased as Fox News. If the BBC is TRYING to be that biased, then their efforts are laughable.

In general the standard of popular, mainstream journalism these days has regressed to be nothing more than shallow, superficial, thinly guised opinion pushing an agenda.

They're all on NBC. At the end of every show, when they show previews of the show for next week, a "This preview powered by Microsoft Windows Vista" blurb appears, and the preview is shown in a mockup of Windows Media Player. Been seeing these since the official consumer launch. *Very annoying.*

Because they're getting *slammed* by the media. Microsoft is not used to getting this sort of reception, especially for a product that they believe is a revolutionary rework of Windows.

It's really bad news when the mainstream media says your product is generally very good, but that it comes with a boatload of hassles that consumers would be wise to avoid.

Overall, I'm pretty impressed with the way Vista turned out. It could have been a lot worse. The whole development cycle was a train wreck, one disaster after another, but they still got something reasonable out the door. We can only imagine a product two-years more advanced than Vista released two years ago, or if that would have even been possible under the best of circumstances. That would have been something.

But today we have a Vista that seems like it arrived just on time, and not a second too soon. It sits right beside MacOSX and a couple strides ahead of Linux in terms of sophistication and polish for the desktop.

The server is another story entirely. It's quite possible that Vista will be remembered as the troubled desktop release that cost Microsoft their grip on corporate IT. Windows Longhorn will be a server OS still designed for tower boxes in an era where IT is moving towards blades, big SMP, and mainframes at their respective levels of scale. Mostly on the back of Linux and UNIX. Microsoft's commitment to virtualized Windows/Linux mixed environments is late, and their system doesn't run on many of the bigger server platforms.

Someone will eventually write a large book about what the software industry learned from the Vista development cycle. If universities ever get around to creating useful software engineering curricula (as opposed to computer science), this should be required reading.

//But today we have a Vista that seems like it arrived just on time, and not a second too soon. It sits right beside MacOSX and a couple strides ahead of Linux in terms of sophistication and polish for the desktop. //

I don't know what it is, but it seems like every little preview I see of KDE4 rubs me the wrong way. Hopefully what they release is better than the previews. Kinda the opposite of what Microsoft tends to do (nice previews -- actual released stuff short of what the previews show).

Hype aside, I think Apple does the best with showing impressive previews and having the actual released stuff close to what the previews show. Even if I don't like Apple.

As far as polish, I don't see how you can even BEGIN to talk about how polished KDE4 is/will be just by some information on some sites and some screenshots. Polish is far beyond the visuals.

....but weren't the biggest supporters of "diarrhea of the mouth" Bill Gates & Co.? They were the ones that couldn't shut up while everyone was praising Firefox, Google's Desktop Search, and Mac OS X. They were the same ones that proclaimed time and again, "Longhorn is going to be this, and Longhorn is going to have that."...and how it's going to be so much better than the aforementioned products. The bottom line is that Gates and Ballmer wrote checks that their developers couldn't cash, and that's why they're left with a new version of Windows that resembles more of a service pack, than having any real evolution, or innovation, of it's own.

I agree with Kroc and Thom, the less you shoot off about how much you_can_do, the less you're actually expected_to_do.

Microsoft have essentially repackaged the same product and sold it as brand new since NT4. That works for a while if you are as good at selling stuff as Microsoft, but in the long run, your customers will stop buying if the new products doesn't offer significantly more value than what they allready have bought once or twice before.

So, what to do? My guess is that support and network services will be the key to success in the future. This the only thing left when you already have sold the product your customer needs.

This means that Microsoft needs to act more like telecom companies in the way they are selling things.
I.e. giving away their OS for free if you sign up for some kind of service for a certain period of time.
In fact they could even opensource it, that way they could get help from the community to maintain it.

"Microsoft have essentially repackaged the same product and sold it as brand new since NT4."

So has IBM, Apple, Oracle, Linux, and every other software vendor. Do you expect everything to be built from ground up? Does Toyota build a new Corolla from ground up every time? No, and that's why it's one of the most reliable autos in the world. GM on the other hand, likes to try totally new approach every time, and we all know the quality of those. And for free?! Opensource Windows?! Part of the competition/capitalist societies is for people to get paid for what they do. Microsoft (the programmers, the management, the stock holders, and all they impact) does not need your "community" "help". It just needs your money.

So has IBM, Apple, Oracle, Linux, and every other software vendor. Do you expect everything to be built from ground up? Does Toyota build a new Corolla from ground up every time? No, and that's why it's one of the most reliable autos in the world. GM on the other hand, likes to try totally new approach every time, and we all know the quality of those. And for free?! Opensource Windows?! Part of the competition/capitalist societies is for people to get paid for what they do. Microsoft (the programmers, the management, the stock holders, and all they impact) does not need your "community" "help". It just needs your money.

If you seriously believe that then you really, really need to find a way to run an old copy of Red Hat 6 or something and compare it with say, MEPIS. [EDIT: A decent version thereof, I mean] (Any other two distros from the same two different eras would do just as fine, btw). The difference is astronomical.

Yet the architecture behind them is the exact same... X Window Server + Linux Kernel + GNOME/KDE + etc...heck the X Window Server didn't have ANY major changes 'til X.Org took over, which was upwards of what 10 years? Come on twenex, don't misconstrue the meaning behind his statement...well unless you truly are that ignorant?

Yet the architecture behind them is the exact same... X Window Server + Linux Kernel + GNOME/KDE + etc...heck the X Window Server didn't have ANY major changes 'til X.Org took over, which was upwards of what 10 years? Come on twenex, don't misconstrue the meaning behind his statement...well unless you truly are that ignorant?

No major changes in the X server till X.org took over? Are you sure?

Well X.org came out in 1998. So what about Xinerama ('94), then? What about X session management (94), the Xkb extension (96), LBX (also 96)?

What about the fact that in 1990, neither KDE nor GNOME even existed? What about the fact that in 2000, nor did Beryl? What about the fact that before either kernel version either 2.4 or 2.6, neither did LVM (for all intents and purposes, since it wasn't in the stable tree)? What about the fact that when I last checked, about a year ago, when using KDE and GDM I couldn't shut down straight from a login session without logging out first and then choosing "logout", and now I can?

KDE/GNOME != X Window Server, neither is Beryl. Most of the changes you mention were either bug fixes or the natural evolution of the Linux platform to finally becoming competitive to Windows and Mac OS in features...wow, *high five*!

KDE/GNOME != X Window Server, neither is Beryl. Most of the changes you mention were either bug fixes or the natural evolution of the Linux platform to finally becoming competitive to Windows and Mac OS in features...wow, *high five*!

So what? What changes have happened in Windows? It's more stable, I'll grant you, but apart from that? It's a LITTLE more secure, a LITTLE prettier (with a big bump along the way called the "WindowsXP default theme") and about to become a LOT more restrictive.

Weird statement considering Windows only with Vista became competitive with Linux as a desktop OS.

Linux catched up with windows in the last millenium and are only playing catch up with Mac OS X - and that game is already over. They are on par now. And with Vista Microsoft is - pretty much - on par with Linu and Mac OS X (apart from the excessive and embarrasing system requirements, 16x higher than required for the same functionality in Linux+Gnome).

I have to disagree, Linux has not surpassed even XP in most things, and even though Vista is not the be all and end all of OS's, Linux still hasn't caught up to it. Security wise, Linux is better, stability wise, I find XP and Linux + X Windows to mostly on par, I find that even though the system may stay up, X is not crashproof, especially if you play with compiz/beryl/AIGLX (which you need to run for most of the eye candy that Vista does out of the box)

I like Linux a lot, and run Edgy as my main desktop (I bounce between Kubuntu and FreeBSD) but I don't find setting up and configuring a Linux box to be as easy as an XP box, and I don't find it any faster when running. It does boot faster, but really, that's not such a big deal, I can't use either one while it's booting.

I have used Linux since 2000 and I believe I have a good grasp of how to setup a system quickly and properly, and I have to say, Most Linux distros are good solid OS's, but they do have their problems, just different ones than Windows. Windows does suck when comparing security and openness, as well as shear complexity, and it certainly costs too much. I don't think that Vista is any different, though it would have been nice if it was.

From a business perspective, it wouldn't have matterd if the Linux architecture had been the same. The open source business model is already service oriented. So, Linux would be practically immune to rehashing the same old stuff over and over again (not that they have done so). If you sell something as a Linux vendor, it is support, and support is needed regardless what version number your software carries.

This doesn't mean that Linux haven't evolved just the same. There is an enormous difference between the 2.2 series of kernel and the 2.6 series. We have new systems like D-Bus, the user interface have improved,...

I am, in fact, still running RedHat 6, Mandrake 7, Windows NT, and OS/2 in production, because they're just fine for what they were advertised. My point with Apple is that OS X is built on NextStep, just like Windows whatever(tm) is built on NT (which in my book stands for "Nice Try"). And, I'm not talking about packages, just the core OSes. I agree that a company cannot continue making money just by releasing an OS; and Be was a good proof of that. IBM knew that decades ago, and marketed it's products on the basis of how they would solve a particular business need. However, at the end, customers still wrote checks to IBM for an OS and a bunch of hardware.

Toyota have an advantage over the software industry, their product rusts or break down over time. This means that they can get away with selling the same product to the same customers year after year. Software on the other hand will have the same functionality forever.

And no, Apple and Linux haven't repackaged old products and sold them as new. Back at the time of NT4, MacOS-X wasn't even born, and I can assure you that there is a very big difference between e.g. Red Hat 6 and Novell Suse Enterprise Desktoop, or any other modern Linux.

You are also right that people want to get paid for their work. This means that you better work with something people are prepared to pay for. Today OSes and office productivity software have reached a level of maturity where the cost of replacing them is more than what you gain from new inventions if any in the new version.

So to get paid, you need to offer services that more closely interact with the businesses of the users. It could be search services like Google, or perhaps some kind of payment services, or something we havn't heard of yet. What these service will have in common is that you can sell it over and over again.

There will be very little money in fixing bugs of the OS. That's why its a good idea to leave this to the customer, just like much of the software testing have been left to the customer. This is why it makes sense to opensource windows, and slip a DVD with windows for free in every computer related magazine you can think of.

"Microsoft have essentially repackaged the same product and sold it as brand new since NT4"

Yeah right, that statement right there blows your credibility right out of the water. WinXP and NT are about as different as can be, Christ, NT didn't even have plug and play. The differences in the kernel between NT and Vista are huge, and NT didn't run on 64 bit x86 processors.

I do tend to agree with you that opensourcing windows would be a good thing, but it will never happen, MS is addicted to closed source.

Memphis, Cairo, Vienna, Chicago... these were good names in the sense that they clearly referred to different versions of Windows, much like OS X's big cat theme (Tiger, Leopard, Jaguar, etc.). Why not continue keeping the development name (Vienna) while making the official product name Windows 7.0?

I've said it before, and I will say it again - 'vista' is microsoft's 'copland'
I am not surprised that other companies dont learn from other companies mistakes :-)

You might add "and/or their own past mistakes". So am I, but if they did - then IBM would have been the only proprietary computer company, Windows would BE the "GPL'd Windows compatible" operating system instead of having a GPL'd Windows compatible rival, and one or more of VMS, ITS, Amiga, LispMachines, Mac and Archimedes might be viable alternative platforms produced by a variety of manufacturers on both the hardware and software sides.

I have said it before, and I will say it again: No legitimate source should ever link to a Mary Jo Foley article. I first started encountering her crap through that useless MicrosoftWatch website, and now I see links to her ramblings on a regular basis.

I gained nothing from this blurb, even given she admitted that it is her speculation mixed with info from her "sources". At least this time she did not attempt to get too technical, considering she makes an ass of herself every time she tries to dig beneath the surface of a "topic".

Apparently Mary Jo needs to occasionally release something to justify her paycheck. Whoever pays this woman is either oblivious to her lack of knowledge or using her with that exact trait. I wonder if she gets a MS paycheck...?

Just for entertainment, I would love to have her explain the inter workings and implementation of .NET. Her last attempt was hilarious!

"This emoticon attached the Windows name signifies that our lack of understanding of the collaborative nature of the internet and its ability to provide a superior development model will allow a steady decline in the quality of our OS from the golden Windows 2k release. In effect, we attribute the rise of the web with the slow death of Windows, starting with this edition."